I'm going to play a one-shot of "Call of Cthulhu", or at least something similar, come Tuesday. Our usual Acts of Evil group couldn't get together, so we're playing something else as a change of pace. We agreed that I'd be working up something horror-related, simulationistic perhaps, and preferably scary in an immersiony sense. Ghost story stuff, in other words. The inspiration here is directly Call of Cthulhu; I've been reading and comparing the fourth and sixth editions for an article I'm writing, and it came to me that the teens around here have not played that game practically at all. Then I figured that we really should play the Haunted House, the old and famous CoC scenario about an old sorcerer.

Now, the one hitch here is that I don't particularly like the idea of using the BRP system of CoC to do this one-shot. I haven't played with the system for years, so my feel for it is off, and I don't like the things that system does for a horror game: the large matrix of percentaged skills, the idiosyncratic behavior of abilities vs. skills, and all the extra rules for combat, buying stuff and so on; all that makes BRP, but it's not something I'd want to mess with for a one-shot that's not even supposed to be high-points-of-contact and gamist, which are what you get pretty easily with BRP around here. I can well imagine that the first hour of play would be spent in figuring out how well the investigators can swim, which is completely useless information for the scenario. I won't even go into the horrid reward cycles (or the lack thereof) I'm seeing in the BRP system.

My second idea was to use Dead of Night; it's a splatter horror game, but it's designed to run in one session and the rules system is not as annoying. I'm not sure, though, whether I should hack in some sanity rules to get more of a CoC feel into the game. The recommended method of play for DoN seems to be semi-open towards the players; the
players participate in creating the Tension point rules and such, so I don't know how the game would work for a mystery investigation scenario like Haunted House. I guess that sanity could be hacked by making it one more aspect of the Survival points. Just give the monsters and whatever a special ability to cause some mental score checks for Survival loss just for viewing the monster/book/whatever. Similarly characters could get Survival points back for triumphing over the horrors, just like CoC.

One solution to my dilemma would be to discard the CoC trappings and just create a pure Dead of Night scenario; I've been intending to run the game at some point using a Japanese style "scary woman with hair" as the monster. It would be nice to use the Haunted House, though; we used to play a lot of CoC during the '90s, and that particular scenario is a fond memory and our first game of CoC at the time. I GMed it then, too, with two players, and everybody was tense and scared (in the good way) long before the characters found Corbit in his vault. Might be that I'm just trying to revisit the past here. Especially sad when the rest of our CoC play was, for the most part, hampered by the systemical faults of BRP, group agenda and faulty GMing skills. Reading the new edition of the game now, I'm impressed by the background work and game ideas in there. Would be nice to see if I could run a CoC game that was actually tense and suspenseful, even if I didn't use the BRP rules.

So: if anybody has ideas for the system to use for the Haunted House, I'm all ears. I'd even settle for a scholarly analysis of BRP from the viewpoint of why it is, actually, a good system for a horrorful investigation game. Or if anybody who has played DoN before wants to give me simple pointers for how the game should be ran to make it feel like CoC, all the better.

Actually, another stray thought about this: the way characters are inserted into situation in Call of Cthulhu is screwed, I need to figure out some reasonable replacement technique for doing it. I just now remembered what a bother the investigator role put upon player characters in that game is: the game assumes that all characters are some kind of occult investigators working together and wondrously motivated to solve hazardous occult mysteries. While it is possible to play this set-up, it's always felt strained to me, and wont to leave players with little rooting in the fictional situation. As I remember it, you can still have immediate visceral horror in the game that way, but the larger context stays horribly vague when your character really is going into danger just because that's the adventure, not because there is any real in-fiction reason to do so. Adding professional veneer to it (a government organization that hires professional spook-hunters, say) works even worse, because then the frail sanities, ignorance of the occult and half-competent skill-set-ups of the characters make even less sense.

Thinking of the context of the Haunted House, there's this landlord who wants to get rid of the haunting. The adventure itself suggests several possible hooks, starting with the ol' "you're related to the landlord and want to help him" and going through the usual permutations. The thing is that this doesn't actually resolve the relationship between the player characters: having all characters come in with different motivations and angles is a sure-fire way to draw attention to inter-character relationships, which is not at all what CoC is about. And having all characters start with the same exact background is not much better: if all the characters are doing it for the money, then how come they are working together? If they're all relatives of the landlord, what kind of sense does it make for the landlord to ask his whole clan to help him all at once? It all feels stilted and artificial.

The way we played this in the '90s, and I guess how others have played it, is to just not think about why the characters do what they do. I don't know if I'm satisfied by that, though. Perhaps the only nigh-reasonable solution is to have the characters be a "Scooby gang" of young idiot friends who are too curious for their own good. Good for one session's laughs, perhaps, but it wouldn't work for a campaign.

Hmm... clearly I need to do some game design here... the ulterior psychological assumption of the CoC set-up is that the player characters, when encountered by horrors beyond space and time, are gripped by an immediate need to set things right and be heroic for the sake of their way of life. A campaign context is created by assuming that the same characters, when they overcome their first case, will continue to keep their eyes open and, ultimately, start their own organization of occult trouble-shooting to preserve their fellow men from the intelligent fungi and other hazards of the cosmos. Considering this, perhaps the most sensible way of starting the scenario is to outright declare that all the characters are already scarred by the supernatural and therefore convinced that they need to stop the monsters, even if they know not what they are. Perhaps each character could have an initiation scene like they do in Dogs in the Vineyard... some horrible encounter with the occult, something that caused the character to believe in the supernatural and willing to endanger himself for curiosity and protection of the innocents.

As far as Lovecraft is concerned, my game of choice is Jared A. Sorensens Unspeakable, a freebie two-page mod for InSpectres. I even posted an Actual Play report some months ago.

This might or might not be the game you need. Some notes:

* The game itself has this semi-serious feel. If you're going for a deadly serious Lovecraftian horror, rather than a loathsome game of non-euclidean encounters with blasphemous beings that just can't be described, I believe it would still support it well. However, the whole group would have to actively strive to make it serious. Not that it's that much different from standard CoC, though.

* I have no idea how well it would work with a pre-established module.

* Playing the game, we've been tweaking it a bit. We added more player choice to Sanity rolls, as in the AP. Also, despite the author's clarifications somewhere on the Forge, we've been gathering Job Dice as per normal InSpectres rules, as we came to the conclusion that otherwise the resolution loses its purpose and the pacing is screwed. For a module, perhaps separate Job Dice could be collected for each major aspect of the scenario, depending on which one is explored in a given scene.

* Confessional as letters and diaries is just to brilliant to be true.

Regarding the starting context, why not simply give the players some introduction to the situation and ask each of them how the character got involved, individually? Since it's supposed to be a one shot, I don't suppose you actually need a classic CoC-style party of investigators. Possibly, you could lay out the hooks provided by the scenario, asking that players differentiate their starting points. Keep in mind I don't know the module, though.

I did consider UnSpeakable, but I don't want a whit of player-authoring nor zany humour in this exercise, really. I would much rather revisit my past as a GM with solid backstory, with players having wide leeway in character action but no appreciable input into the backstory. Lots of immersive horror, too. InSpectres is ultimately the No Myth game, so it'd be pointless to mix it with my particular goals here. Also, on a more concrete level, I don't find the Cyclopean Strength and other perks for eroding sanity to fit very well in the CoC paradigm.

I could well see using UnSpeakable for a similar excercise in the future, though, if this CoC nostalgy wave continues through the winter. Playing Acts of Evil has gotten me into a mindset where all kinds of cthulhoid roleplaying is starting to seem rather alluring. I could even imagine playing BRP, quirks and all, if we were doing a long-term campaign where I could use all the nuances of the system. (Would still have to switch the roll-based hint-allocation with something else.)

As for the starting context, the reason I don't think that separate hooks work well is that it tends to focus play into intra-character relationships and maneuvering. If one character is involved because he's a private eye who is being paid to investigate the house, while another one is a Christian neighbour too curious for his own health, then what we get is a lot of scenes that repeat similar information from different viewpoints, lots of maneuvering about who knows what and lots of dialogue when characters try to figure out whether they can trust each other or not. After all, the difference in character motivations and viewpoints is rather dramatic in that kind of a situation. That's one kind of story, but I'd much rather focus on the characters encountering the horror. They don't have to all work together as a commando team to achieve this, but there does need to be reason for each character to participate naturally, without us spending half of the session roleplaying the relationship of a character to his mother who's afraid of the haunted house, or something like that.

The above is based on my earlier experience with this kind of thing, mind. The immersive/procedural style of play we want for CoC-style horror to emerge also means that players start careening on all kinds of tangents if their characters have internal tensions that need resolving. Ideally, to tell the truth, the character is not real in a CoC game as I understand it. It shouldn't interfere with the experiencing of the mystery and the horror, and it definitely shouldn't have any complex hook-based motivations that might inspire the character to get out of the story in the middle. From that viewpoint it'd seem natural to make all characters just a part of some occult detective agency, but then we loose the "normal humans against the occult" wibe that's also part of CoC's charm. I never was very particular to the Delta Green idea of pitting military experts against the occult monstrosities. Doesn't seem very scary, that.

I like to ask players to construct non-reciprocal links with the other characters, so that they are all linked in a causal chain.  then you only need to affect on link on the chain to set them all in motion.  The connections establish why this person is willing to help that person, and why they would be asked to be help, so there is some niche negotiation here.  Maybe you only need one occult investigator, who has a go-to guy for magical analysis and the like, and that is your next PC.  Once this is in place you can then invoke those links to actually produce play content, so you could start play with the investigator alone and then do an encounter for which he needs his magician contacts help, play out that request and bring the characters in in sequence through the course of the first session.

Something like that works to defuse the intra-character tensions in a campaign, Gareth. Thing is, it doesn't work so well in the one-shot context I'm preparing for Tuesday.

I guess that my best shot is to not have the group think about it too much. Just presume together that the characters are both committed to resolving the mystery of the haunted house, while being horribly unprepared to face the dark powers within, all the while being also reasonably trustful and harmonious towards each other. Perhaps something develops through the process of play to fill in the holes in those presumptions if we just leave the background unexplained.

Anyway, that's incidental. Any ideas about the system? I guess I could try running a GM-led freeform game in this case as well, although it's more natural for me to tinker together a simple system for the purpose before Tuesday. I have a pretty good idea of the genre and things I want the game to have, I'm just now realizing that there really isn't many games that already do this stuff very well. BRP feels horribly outdated, while Dead of Night is a little bit off, it being all about movie shock horror. Tricky.

Hi Eero,

Man, if it weren't for your "...not a whit of player-authoring..." caveat, the Anti-Pool would be great.

In fact, it still would be great if you could find something to replace MoVs in the system.

Maybe rolls accumulate like in Lacuna (some sort of tension analog for BPM), and instead of a MoV, players can elect to scale the tension back down (either a fixed or variable amount).

Cheers,
Darcy

Eero wrote:
Something like that works to defuse the intra-character tensions in a campaign, Gareth. Thing is, it doesn't work so well in the one-shot context I'm preparing for Tuesday.

Anyway, that's incidental. Any ideas about the system? I guess I could try running a GM-led freeform game in this case as well, although it's more natural for me to tinker together a simple system for the purpose before Tuesday. I have a pretty good idea of the genre and things I want the game to have, I'm just now realizing that there really isn't many games that already do this stuff very well. BRP feels horribly outdated, while Dead of Night is a little bit off, it being all about movie shock horror. Tricky.

The freeform question is interesting, and ties in to Darcy's suggestion. The way I see it, What I Want is sanity rules. I want to get to roll the dice on whether a character breaks when they see the horror, and also how much they are affected long-term. That's the real focus of the CoC rules and also something I want, simply because without a system for that, there is no "mind-shattering horror" in a roleplaying game. I'm not going to exactly shatter the minds of my players with lurid descriptions, so at least I can shatter the minds of the characters.

I also want to some nice sub-system for doling out clues. I could just give out whatever I wanted when the characters got into the appropriate place (the library, police station, whatever), but the player experience might be improved if there was some kind of skill/resource/whatever system in there. That kind of thing tends to focus the game and emphasize the importance of the clues, which is good, because otherwise the players will have difficulty to understand the push of the scenario. Then again, I guess I could drop out the investigative parts, but then all the pacing of the scenario would rest on the GM instead of the players. The way I understand it, the real benefit of the investigative structure for a horror roleplaying game is that the players get to control when and how and why the characters go to the different places in the scenario. This makes a lot of difference for how players experience the horror scenes; if there was no step-by-step revelation of the backstory, then the whole game would end up a railroaded set-piece description.

Hmm... what else do I need... actually, that's pretty much it as far as I can see. I guess having a parallel system for bodily injury alongside the mental one would be useful, again to emphasize the events. GM fiat decisions are not that useful for this kind of thing, because players will react by getting passive when the GM punishes their characters. I want players to panic and crawl feverishly away from the monster, not just calmly wait for me to finish a description of the events. If the end-results of violent encounters with the monsters are all up to GM fiat, then players in my experience tend to be pretty blasé about whatever happens to their characters.

This is all pretty similar to what Dead of Night offers, except that it's even weaker in the clue department than CoC, not being built to provide clues or any other kind of pacing outside horrorful crisis situations.

Hello Eero

A friend of mine has been fiddling a bit with updating CoC to get the cool stuff without being bothered with some of the not-so-ccol stuff. It's incomplete, and the link would be pretty useless unless you read danish, but he did come up with one really nice useable-as-is idea regarding the doling out of clues. In traditional CoC, it is a bit of a problem that the players have to succeed at that Spot Hidden or Library Use check, or the game stops dead in it's tracks.

Morten's idea is that you automatically succeed in getting the info that is required to keep the plot moving, if it is one of those really necessary bits, but if you don't succeed on your roll, it has other unfortunate consequences. So if you fail your roll, you discover the cultists' hideout, but a day after they sacrificed the virgin. Or, the secretly cultist librarian discovers what you're up to and sends madmen with long knives after you. Or whatever. The point is that you still want, badly, to succeed, but the plot doesn't grind to a halt if you don't. This will require some work from the keeper to come up with punishments for failure at those crucial rolls, but it need only be used for key stuff, not every little roll. If you want the players to "control" the pacing with investigation, you could use this as backup, in case they get stuck, but I think it might be worth it to use it up front.

Also, on Sanity, that most crucial mechanic. In some of the published stuff, you check Sanity for "ordinary" scary stuff, and it rather cheapens the cosmic horror. Sanity loss should be reserved for the stuff that wears down your world-view and exposes the horrid emptiness that lurks beneath the surface, not scary stinky dead sheep. Oh, and cheap and convenient magic is bad for the atmosphere. Using magic should cost sanity, and involve Forbidden Knowledge and stuff. Cure Light Wounds and the like are the bane of CoC, and a number of convenience spells have worked their way into the system. Cut them, or make them dark and costly.

My two cp,

Troels

A couple of suggestions:

-Someone mentioned using The Pool (or Anti-Pool). I just wanted to add that, if you like that system, you can use it without any MoVs. I've done this before, and it's still a great system--you don't need them to use The Pool. The roll is about success or failure--the GM still holds narrational power.

-As for finding a good premise for the characters to be investigating the mystery together... how about greed? What if they all want something in the House? Perhaps there is an ancient book of secrets they're really hoping to get their hands on, or something else that's a powerful enough draw for them to brave horrors from the Beyond. They may be working together as a team (a la Mountain Witch), or maybe they're all there because they believe each other character has some skill or resource they will need (like a D&D adventuring party).

Cheers,

Paul

Hi Eero,

A slight aside, but 'actual play' relevant, a while back I ran a few sessions of CoC Delta Green for my group, who had been playing HeroQuest for some time, and despite them all being used to BRP from many years of playing CoC and Runequest a couple of the players found it very difficult to go back to narrowly defined skill lists, with little scope for overlaps and no way of augmenting skills with other relevant ones. One player also struggled with the apparent lower level of skills and higher failure rate for an otherwise highly competent character.

There has been some discussion over at the FateRPG Yahoo Group about using a hack of Fate 3 / SotC for Lovecraft games. As I understand it one of the core play test groups for FATE 3 (Burton Foundation) were playing a Cthulhu campaign.

This post in particular may be worth a read if you are interested, and the FATE 3 SRD contains everything else you would need to run that game.

Thank you all for seed ideas. I spent last night reading the 6th edition rulebook for CoC, and I have to agree with Troels about the utility magics. I think I'll have to skim through the 4th edition as well just out of curiosity, to see if the same stuff is there as well.

Web_Weaver's experience mirrors my own: BRP is a rather ugly and unrealistic system when you compare it to modern stuff. So I'd rather just avoid the headache of using it. FATE is not a bad interim solution (for anything, really), although it focuses on characters in a rather dramatic manner. For longer term I'd definitely want something else.

I'll spend tonight crunching together an amiable solution for tomorrow's session. I'll let you know here how it worked.

Hi Eero

I hope this doesn't come too late: I played a oneshot with a modified Pool variant (basically, the GM had to give bonus dice each time he introduced mythos contents, and vice-versa, players gave the GM mythos-credits when they used bonus-dice that they hadn't received from the GM, or something like that, I can look it up again if you want to know more. it was also tied to potential SAN loss).
So, there was quite a lot of player narration, but most of the content and scene framing was held by me, the GM.

I had prepared a rough story map before play, detailing three groups of NPCs all connected to the same mythos source in a different way (as it were: astronomers, fishermen and somebody I forget). Each player had to create a character with a strong link to at least one of those groups of NPCs. It was then my job to frame relevant scenes for the PCs, tying them together over time via the aforementioned NPC groups. A lot of arbitrary pacing and content decisions on my part, but the characters were firmly placed in the midst of the action and dragging the poor NPCs along. The modified dice mechanic allowed me to get a rough feel for mythos revelation progress, but it was still a bit light (I'd use some kind of formal scene-framing mechanic on top of that now, probably).

That sounds interesting for the longer term investigation of the CoC topic, Christoph. I don't think it's right for my session tomorrow, though, as I'm trying to keep the mechanics and content undramatic (that is, not concerning character relationships or motivations). A lot of the Pool-derived tradition of design works counter to this by allowing players to make all kinds of dramatic statements that deduct from the backstory constraints of the GM.

I'm sorry I can't verbalize what I'm shooting for any better right now, perhaps I can describe what worked and what didn't when we actually play the session tomorrow.

Hi Eero,

I'm looking forward to hearing back from you on how your game goes.  Of course, now I have this stupid Pool-Lacuna mashup running around in my head.

Thanks a lot...

Cheers,
Darcy

OK, we played the game on Tuesday, and now I have the time to write about it. Here's a short rundown of what I learned:

The Good

We played in a mid-class Chinese restaurant in Iisalmi, which is always nice. Our usual haunt, when it comes to public places, is a cheap kebab/pizza restaurant favoured by teenagers, so it was a nice change of pace to upgrade a bit. The restaurant staff of Kai Sheng has previously indicated no animosity towards us well-mannered roleplayers, so we went, we ate a lot and played a full session.

The Bad

Everything else, pretty much. Luckily we played with a considerably high quality crew who can take the occasional flop with grace. Still, the actual play had all the same problems I've learned to associate with Call of Cthulhu:

• Players have no fucking clue of what they're supposed to be doing. Even if the GM outright tells them what they should be doing, often enough they don't have the appropriate tools or skill sets available.
• Everything takes a long, long time, because the GM and the players are entangled in a misplaced effort to situation immerse, often in the wrong places and with non-working techniques. It doesn't help that there is no methods for chairmanning the procedure or framing scenes efficiently.
• Everything does take such a long time that you'd need 8-hour sessions to even get to the rhythm, not to speak of actually accomplishing anything in the fiction.
• Player actions, as produced by the structural tools of CoC, are so undirected that they do more to slow and hamper play than speed it along. Worse, the usual player reaction to the process friction is to act brashly and outside the genre, which further deteriorates the fiction.

So it was all rather dull to play, I'm afraid. In concrete terms, to give an idea of how painful the investigation process with CoC methodology can be: at the beginning of the scenario we played there is mention of this family, who lived in the haunted house before both spouses went mad from the events there. They don't know anything particularly important about the house or its secrets. Regardless, one of the players managed to spend the entire session maneuvering at the asylum, apparently convinced that those two poor victims would reveal something of appropriate usefulness. Not that the other players managed any better, mind: they had this idea that spiritism would help them reveal and dispose of the evil spirits at the house, so that's what they messed with. Meanwhile, the scenario itself is a classically structured mystery, with little possible improvisation in flushing out the dark secret. It's not going to just jump out of the psyche of a third-rate NPC at a asylum, or panic at a random spiritist session; to figure out the mystery of the Haunted House requires examination of the history of the house and finding the final resting place of old Corbit, the owner of the house. So any responsiveness from the GM for the players's off-the-wall ideas would just serve to ruin the actual mystery scenario. Insofar as the scenario can be interpreted as a conflict between old Corbit and the investigators, Corbit is winning as long as the investigators stumble along with little talent or idea of appropriate research technique involved. From this viewpoint the scenario itself could be considered faulty: the way for the antagonist to win is to let the players bore themselves to death.

Well, at least I got lots to think about, and valuable data as to the credibility of the CoC GMing instructions and adventure design. In hindsight it is pretty obvious that a horror adventure wouldn't go well with a carefully delineated monster strategy and limited powers - means that the monster isn't going to spend too much time at being fearsome, being that it can't do that much. Also, the investigative structure is rubbish and needs to be heavily restructured to make it work for the horror atmosphere. I wrote some additional musings on the topic at my blog: here's something about the alternative and simplified rules system I used, while here is another formulation of the investigation question I've been wrangling with.

Hi again, sorry to here you found the game dull.

I am guessing from your bullet points that you don't prioritise exploring colour, because despite me agreeing in principle with many of your points I can't help letting my inner geek-sim-Lovecraftian ponder that I would have loved GMing the asylum scenes (when it comes to CoC I am unashamedly sim orientated) .

When players have wandered, as they inevitably do in this game, I have tended to push heavily on the colour elements, little gothic details of how the core horror is spilling out into the world and effecting the people around it, often serving as a thematic warning to stay away and not get too involved. And these bits remain my favourite moments running CoC.

The sleepy English village Police Station where they have collected evidence and then buried it in their records with a mixture of deliberate and unconscious denial. The elderly country farmer who has no idea what is going on but knows not to go poking his nose in, and can tell stories about strange happenings and tunnels under the hills until his cows come home, and so encouraging the investigators whilst simultaneously warning them to stay out of it. The insane shopkeeper who has seen too much, who whilst not being drawn on anything to do with the old house, constantly trips up on apparently innocuous words as if over cautious not to talk about certain things.

Sure its 'only colour' and can't help the players achieve anything in terms of the investigation, but as far as creating a gothic flavour and giving the players a feeling for what their investigators are up against, these asides are invaluable. And I don't see these colour elements as being fundamentally tied to any agenda or play style if used with care.

I wish I'd found this thread earlier, because I've be re-reading Lovecraft and thinking about some similar issues.  I've actually been working on adapting some of the Dogs In The Vineyard mechanics; my thought was to handle investigations as a conflict in which the players are attempting to find the answer to whatever question they're pursuing.  The rub is that in order to have a chance to inflict any kind of serious insanity fallout on the players, the GM has to reveal more and more of the supernatural elements of the scenario by narrating them into the conflict to hamper the players' investigation.  The idea is that either way the players get something out of the investigation: if they roll well and have good skills, they get answers to the questions they're asking and may lose a little sanity along the way; if they roll badly and/or lack skills, they don't find what they were looking for but do stumble onto other related goings-on, and probably lose even more sanity in the process.

I'm not sure if you're interested in further discussion in this direction, though, so I'll hold off on posting more.

I don't really know, but Weaver might just be right that I'm just missing the forest for the trees here. Then again, the game would really need some kind of a reward cycle for me to orient to intentionally extending and colorizing a random and mystery-wise meaningless scene. My instinct here was to be straightforward about the mystery definitely not being at the asylum; I expect that if I'd done more color dwelling than I did (which was a fair amount during the first asylum scene and less in subsequent ones), the players might have misinterpreted that as a signal that there was actually play content available at the Asylum. Also, they might have gotten bored if I made the game even slower than it was. This is very difficult to say in a passive, simulationistic game and pace like this, though; I have some notion that my senses and sensibilities are not trained to gauge how well the players are faring in something like this, perhaps they're doing just fine. I can't say that anybody in the group would have been especially thrilled by the lame fiction we made during the session, but some earlier experiences seem to indicate that players are not, per se, agonized by passivity and a slow pace, as long as they can take it from the audience viewpoint.

It's also pretty suspect that I claim the purpose of the game to be "situation immersion", but then I don't recognize nor appreciate any opportunity for situation immersion at the asylum. This is mostly because I was oriented towards presenting the premade adventure material instead of improvising, so perhaps that's part of the problem. This kind of glacial immersion would seem to work better with improvisation. Then again, it might also work better without a GM monopoly on long descriptive monologues and such, but that's a different game from CoC, again. Interesting and intriguing, trying to work with a CA mode I've not played much for the last ten years.

Snowden: DiV is a fine match for a horror game (you probably know of Afraid, Vincent's own hack), but again, it's side-stepping the issue. I've been trying to think my head around why I really arranged for that session of CoC, and my answer seems to be that I'm simply curious to see if there's actually anything salvageable in the methods and play style advocated by one of the great classics of gaming. So switching over to conflict resolution and flexible No Myth backstory, while a fine solution for the Lovecraftian subject matter itself, is outside the purview of what I'm trying to do here. Heck, even playing the game commando-style, as the player portion of the advice suggests, is largely outside my field of interest right now. Perhaps when I solve the immersion problem satisfactorily.

I don't know about you, but I feel pulled in two directions when I try and return to Sim play of any kind, on the one hand wanting to utilise a wider technique toolbox but on the other not wanting to mess too much with a game that used to work.

I have expressed elsewhere that CoC and the other BRP games did do a pretty good job of Sim and I don't feel they had anywhere near the coherence problems that later RPGs did. It's just that they don't really have a solid set of techniques and mechanics built into them that drive home the agenda because back in the heyday of RQ2/3 and early CoC we all 'knew' that gaming was all about Sim without being told what it was.

I wonder what your actual motive is for deciding to run CoC? I here what you have to say about structure and investigation but why do you want your players to experience CoC?

Are you like me, wanting to show younger players the best elements of the past, and insisting that they at least taste the old classics like Paranoia or Pendragon, or do you want to revisit them for some different reason?

(At least with my reasons I can point to the system and say look that bit doesn't make sense nowadays. :-) )

Gotcha; as a Lovecraft fan who never "got" CoC, I think I was projecting.  Good luck!

My motives here were and are mostly of intellectual curiousity - no particular need to show the teens how we played in the past, but rather a personal look back at what we used to play and how it worked. CoC promises a rather unique genre of play, which itself is interesting and markedly prominent in many '80s games; at that time there was a great drive at originality in genre and setting, with less emphasis on outright media emulation. Call of Cthulhu with its rather unique blend of detective horror proffers a specific challenge I'm interested in - how do you actually make use of the investigative process as a framework for horror immersion?

A longer-term motivation here is to simply learn to be a better and more flexible roleplayer, and perhaps find inspiration for new kinds of rpg design. It's an oft-repeated bit that we don't do enough high-quality sim design here at the Forge, so I wouldn't mind "fixing" CoC to do the things I'd like it to do, if I only figure out how. So in that regard I'm just fiddling with basic research at this point, seeing what's what in Sandy Petersen's design.

As for the coherence problems, I find the game text itself one of the most incoherent ones of all time. Just the mere fact that I'm here babbling about playing immersive horror Cthulhu, while the rulebook advices quite clearly that the game is about killing monsters while managing your limited Sanity supply, is a demonstrative pointer about that. It's interesting how this clear tendency was rather totally ignored by us, and probably many others, when we actually played the game during the '90s. I would even hazard that the rules system makes much more sense as a challenge-based commando game, I'd find that much easier to run with those rules than the immersive simulationistic horror story. Things like investigation with skill checks could be stacked with stakes for figuring out tactically pertinent secrets and so on, giving the investigative process clear strategic implications. That's how many of the standard adventures read, so in that sense it'd certainly make sense, despite the admittedly numerous pieces of advice in the book for the opposite style of running the game as well.

Eero wrote: Call of Cthulhu with its rather unique blend of detective horror proffers a specific challenge I'm interested in - how do you actually make use of the investigative process as a framework for horror immersion?

Yeah, I know of Gumshoe, just haven't gotten around to checking it out. For all I know it might resolve all the problems I have with CoC single-handedly.

GB wrote:
Cthulhu is best played with players who want their characters to go mad and die.

Eero wrote:
Call of Cthulhu with its rather unique blend of detective horror proffers a specific challenge I'm interested in - how do you actually make use of the investigative process as a framework for horror immersion?

A question:

Is the investigative framework important in Lovecrafts actual writing?

I have read virtually no lovecraft I'll admit, but my impression from the little I have is that this is really just an expositionary device.  It's walking the reader through the process of discovery rather than conducting a formal investigation.  The reasons people engage with the horror seems to be usually personal, rather than arising from their job function.  Isn;t the investigative aspect something more like justificatory colour?

I suggest the investigative framework might be totally misbegotten, and the real question is "how to make going mad fun".  One among the types of stories you tell with a system that makes going mad fun uses investigations and whatnot as its entry point, rather than being the central action of the game.

contracycle wrote:
Is the investigative framework important in Lovecrafts actual writing?

I find Call of Cthulhu to be its own genre, albeit with heavy Lovecraft fetishization. Perhaps this has something to do with the way gaming geeks approach the themes of Lovecraft: CoC is very concrete and in-your-face about the supposed "horror" of Lovecraft, presuming that we find horror in the concrete descriptions of the inhuman monsters or whatever. Adventures are usually rather graphic and prosaic, which is not something I'd say about Lovecraft stories.

The investigation procedure is also very central to published CoC material, which is only true of Lovecraft in the abstract sense: a Lovecraft horror story, generally speaking, is a step-by-step exercise in introducing new ideas and corresponding physical manifestations. Whether this happens because the character investigates actively or just because he happens to have the wrong blood in his veins or live in the wrong house or married the wrong woman or whatever is completely up in the air for Lovecraft, which it is not for Call of Cthulhu.

That being said, I have little difficulty with "doing" Lovecraft in a roleplaying game. It's simple, you can use well-tested mechanical technology and system techniques, you know exactly what you're trying to do... all very simple in its own way, anything from Shock: to Dead of Night can do it. Even my own zombie game can do it. As it stands, I'm significantly more interested in doing Call of Cthulhu, specifically, exactly because it is far from obvious how the active CSI-style investigative content should be used to pace and structure horror events. The questions becomes even more interesting when you read the GMing advice and realize that CoC instructs very clearly that it should be played as slice-of-life roleplaying: adventures should stream seamlessly from one to another, you should track time and resources in the off-time the investigators take, you might have several investigations going at once, and a central theme to it all is the increasing institutional knowledge of the mythos gained by the player characters during the process, which further refines their understanding of what it means to be a "mythos investigator". This is not Lovecraft, this is a specific invention of Sandy Petersen.

Which brings something to mind... Conspiracy of Shadows has a set of techniques and structure that might well be relevant for something like this. Specifically, it has the same presumed campaign structure to the tee. Good to remember, that.

I see.  I misunderstood your goal.. But then, a system suggestion is easy for me - Conspiracy X, a system I regard as one of the best and most elegant in print.

In the second edition or in expansions to the first edition, there are also organised rules for investigative actions, and for constructing groups a, conspiracies, and factions.  Characters are defined by membership of these groups or some governmental body which in turns provides the main tools that character will bring to bear.  It is of course aimed towards the conspiracy genre but includes a kind of "supernatural corruption" that is interesting in its own right and can be used to model the cthulhoid descent into insanity easily enough.

Con-X is also very fast in resolution because its semi-karmic; abilities are compared and only rolled if they are close.

Hey, that actually sounds interesting. A good call, all the more so because I've pretty much missed most of the '90s when it comes to rpg design. I'll have to check out Conspiracy X!

Eero wrote:
I've pretty much missed most of the '90s when it comes to rpg design.

For one-shot horror immersion, I'd go for Dread: http://www.tiltingatwindmills.net/dread/index.html.